August 31st, 2006
Building Blog Traffic. Yes, Again.
IMHO, there are few blogger-centric topics more written on than “increasing blog traffic”, so these days, I always tread carefully before jumping on the linkwagon to yet another expert’s 5/10/100 tips on the subject, or even writing a post of my own.
But I can’t help but link to SEOmoz’s latest post: 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic. (From my poorly chosen post title, I’m pretty sure some of you thought I was going to bash someone for writing Yet Another Post. Sorry for not fulfilling those expectations. 
).
It brings in quite a different perspective, which makes it a good complement to some other lists you might already have read.
Here’s what I found most interesting/unique:
- Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
The issue here is with over-marketing your posts, and forcefully attempting to make too many of your posts into linkbait. My experience so far has been that my most linkbait-ish posts were never meant to be llinkbait, so I’ve to admit I don’t really “see” this point yet. But I agree that trying too hard to market your posts (e.g. emailing fellow bloggers all the time, bookmarking all your posts in del.icio.us, Digg, etc.) can be detrimental to your reputation, and thus, traffic levels. - Launch Without Comments (And Add Them Later)
I’ve never actually thought much of turning off comments on launch, and re-implementing it only when you’ve got a decent reader base as a step to increase blog traffic. It’s really just not my style, but I can see how it’d work. As a new reader, I often look at the number of comments a blog gets on average before deciding whether I’d subscribe or return - even though I try my best to ignore everything except the content. - Archive Effectively
One of the suggestions here is to tackle the pagination issue, which is deemed harmful to search engine (SE) traffic since it provides “constantly changing, duplicate content pages), via the “noindex” meta tag orrobots.txtfile. In June, I wrote on the duplicate content problem in blogs (and provided some possible solutions), but didn’t consider pagination to be an issue then. While I still don’t think it’s an issue now, it could be an issue for blogs already in trouble with SEs. - Build a Brand
There’s nothing I can add here. This sentence really says it all:
Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occassional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be offputting for new readers, but they’re solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you.
But before you even start with those, make sure your blog titles are optimised for branding first.
You still here? Good, only 17 tips left to read.
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2 Comments
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
I don’t think you have to disable comments on a new site as much as you’d want to remove the comment count from the site. I’ve had the Frontstretch comments on for the entire time I setup the CMS for my writers to post to the site, however I’ve never had the comment count showing on it.
I’m no expert though, so please set me straight if I’m not seeing something!
Ren
September 6th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
You raise a good point, but removing only the comment count might not be comprehensive enough since it’s entirely possible that potential readers enter your permalink pages (single post pages) and then see that you have zero comments.
More often than not, your approach should work, but for more discriminating feed subscribers, I’m not so sure. At least, that’s my take on it.
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